Web page for ERG (ARASE) mission now available

By: miker on: Sun., July 30, 2017 05:14 PM EDT (2702 Reads)

Yoshi Miyoshi (Arase/ERG Project Scientist) announced on July 31, 2017 that a web page for Arase quick-look data is now available. Click on *Read More* for details.
The ERG (Arase) satellite has now been in full operation since March 24.

The Exploration of energization and Radiation in Geospace (ERG) satellite mission was launched on December 20, 2016 with an Epsilon rocket from the Uchinoura Space Center on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. The aim of the mission is to study Earth's radiation belts. Coordinated operations are planned with the SuperDARN radars. Shortly after launch the satellite was officially nicknamed "Arase", which is a Japanese word for a river raging with rough water and also the name of a river close to the Uchinoura Space Center.

Photo credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

>>> Announcements of web page from Miyoshi-san and Hori-san:

We are pleased to announce that web-page for Arase quick look
is now available from the following website.

If you get permission from the corresponding instrument PI(s), you can use plots from the
above website for your own presentations. But before actually doing it, please read carefully
the rules of the road for the ERG project data, and ask each PI about notes specific to each data.

As you may have known from some news, the Japanese ERG
(Exploration of energization and Radiation in Geospace) satellite
has been successfully launched at 20:00 JST (11:00 UTC) on Dec.
20, 2016, from the Uchinoura Space Center of JAXA (Japanese
space agencDear ERG-Ground Coordinated Observation Colleagues,

Yoshi Miyoshi (ERG Project Scientist) and Iku Shinohara (ERG Project Manager)
noted that the ERG (Arase) satellite has now been in full operation since March 24.
The press release has been out on March 29 athttp://www.isas.jaxa.jp/topics/000920.html
Though this page is in Japanese, you can see photos of the instruments on board
the ERG satellite.

As we noted the ERG-ground campaign observation is going on with centering
the new moon period of March 28, as well as a geomagnetic storm is going on from
March 27. We are having exciting time of finding new events of ground-satellite
conjunction!

ERG will go through a couple of (major) maneuvers during the first half of
January, 2017 to be placed into the regular orbit, which is going to
be the final orbit (no major maneuver is planned after them
through its mission life). Then we will move on to
the detailed checking of each scientific instrument onboard.
Hopefully we will start the regular observation with the full set of
the instruments from the second half of March, 2017.

As for the spacecraft schedule request, middle of Jan 2017 is an
important milestone at which the schedule request for March, 2017
is due, and the detailed result of the major
maneuvers is out and we are able to identify conjunction windows
between SDs and ERG more accurately. Japanese SD members and
I will work on identifying and proposing time slots with designated
radars for which the interleaved normalscan (and some other
modes?) runs for the conjunction observation.

Best regards,
Tomo

Tomo Hori
ERG Science Center

Post-launch email from Miyoshi-san:

Dear All,

As Shiokawa-san has announced, the ERG satellite was successfully launched
and JAXA has named "ARASE" as nickname.

ERG starts a new journey to Van Allen radiation belts, located in the
Earth's inner magnetosphere, where energetic charged particles are
trapped. "ARASE", a Japanese word for a river raging with rough white
water is a fitting description for the journey that lies ahead of ERG.

Arase River, which runs Kimotsuki, Kagoshima, where JAXA's Uchinoura
Space Center is located. Arase River has a local folktale of bird's
beautiful singing. Since ERG observes "chorus", it conveys the
significance well.

The regular operations will start around end of the next March.
We look forward to close collaborations between ARASE (ERG) and PWING
observations.

As you may heard from news, the ERG satellite was successfully launched
from Uchinoura, Kagoshima, Japan at 20JST (11 UT) on Dec.20, 2016.
According to the ERG Project Manager, Dr. Iku Shinohara of ISAS/JAXA,
the current orbit is

The satellite condition is fairly good. They will make satellite
maneuvering twice in January to put the satellite into the planned orbit,
and then extend wire antenna and magnetometer mast.
From late January, the mission instruments will be gradually turned on,
and getting into the full operation by the second half of March, 2017.

The nickname of ERG becomes "ARASE", which means something like
"disturbed rapids", because the radiation belts are a disturbed river of
high-energy particles flowing around the Earth.

We will have the first campaign observation of ERG-ground conjunction
in the second half of March 2017. Details will follow later.

With best wishes for the happy holiday seasons,
Kazuo--------------------
SHIOKAWA, Kazuo
Center for International Collaborative Research (CICR)
Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research (ISEE)
Nagoya University
Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi, 464-8601, Japan